What happens when you link thousands of PS3s together in a vast neural network? If you guessed nuclear apocalypse and a world ruled by T-1000 Terminator robots, you'd probably be right. But, if you're one of those glass half-full kind of people, you might just help rid the world of some pretty serious diseases. Stanford University, through their @Home project, is launching an initiative that lets your PS3 crunch life-saving medical data when you are not too busy playing FantaVision on your shiny new super-computer console.

"To participate, users will just download a program into the PS3's hard drive. Then they just need to leave the machine on when they're not playing. The Folding@home team will divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines."

Sony says that users will also be able to watch their PS3s solve the mysteries of the human genome right before their eyes. "These interfaces are very nice looking, very scientific in a certain way. ... You can use the controller and navigate around... That might make people more likely to download and run the program. All PS3s connect to the Internet, and Sony plans to make it easy for gamers to get the program when they go online."

I'm tempted to make a lame "so, Sony has an online strategy after all" joke, but this is very cool.

[Via CNN]